Split second, p.13
Split Second, page 13
“Okay, Joe, good work,” said Cargill finally. “I’m going to listen to the recording myself and do some thinking.”
Allen nodded to acknowledge this dismissal and swiveled his chair around, locking it into place facing the same direction as his boss.
Cargill listened to the recording with great interest. He had to acknowledge Allen had done a good job of extracting all of the salient information.
Cargill had wanted to find Jenna Morrison, but this had been a low priority. Nathan Wexler had been critical. Jenna Morrison was simply a bystander who happened to be screwing the wrong genius at the wrong time.
But now things were very different. If Wexler’s work really had survived, and his live-in girlfriend knew how to get her hands on it, that was a game-changer.
Knight having it was bad enough. But Knight having it without Cargill having it was unthinkable.
And this might explain one of Knight’s recent moves. Cargill had sent e-mails to both the UCSD physics department and to Dan Walsh, pretending that Wexler was still alive, so he would have more time to clean up after himself.
But later, another message had been sent to Dan Walsh, also pretending to be from Wexler. A message which must have been sent by Edgar Knight. The message had reported that Jenna’s computer was infected, and had warned Walsh to block any e-mails coming from her address. Knight must have known Cargill still had men on the UCLA physicist and was trying to make it harder for Cargill to reacquire the girl.
Cargill hadn’t understood why Knight would go to the trouble. But maybe now he did.
Maybe Knight had known that Jenna had not only survived the attack, but also had access to another copy of her fiancé’s work.
Now all Cargill could do was hope like hell that the flash drive Rourk now had was not legitimate. Either way, he had no other choice but to operate under the assumption that Jenna still had a copy of Wexler’s work.
So Cargill either had to find her, immediately, or find a copy. It was his only hope.
His number one priority was still finding and eliminating Knight, as always. But finding Jenna Morrison had now been elevated to a close second.
And this private eye, or whoever he really was, seemed to be the key.
Cargill decided to play this out in his head, what the scientists he had worked with during his career called a thought experiment. He decided to pretend he was Jenna Morrison, being taken from her home Sunday night along with Nathan Wexler. Not being told why. Then being ambushed and escaping.
She had been very clever not to go to the cops. Hiring someone out of Cargill’s easy reach, instead—a PI, or a mercenary, or whoever this guy was—was inspired.
But regardless of who she went to, or where she found him, she would need to explain what had happened to her. Would he believe her? And what would be his next moves?
Cargill imagined Jenna Morrison describing what had happened, reviewing that night from her perspective. If Cargill had just heard this story without any prior knowledge of the situation, he would want to investigate the scene of the ambush. And her PI had done exactly that.
What else would he have done? What else about her story could he explore?
Cargill’s eyes widened as one interesting possibility presented itself. If the man was as good as Cargill now believed he was, he would want to pull street camera footage of the area near Wexler’s home in La Jolla. He’d want to see the Hostess truck. Confirm it really was in a residential neighborhood at midnight on a Sunday. Hope to get lucky and see a license plate or a clean shot of the driver.
Cargill had made sure this footage had been doctored immediately, since he insisted that Q5 needed to be fanatically thorough when they cleaned up after themselves. And then he had forgotten all about the footage.
But the man now working for Jenna Morrison wouldn’t know this was a dead end. So he would try to get the video. For Cargill to find the PI in this way, the man would have had to come up with the idea and then have the necessary connections to be able to obtain the footage. This was unlikely, but well worth following up on.
Cargill undid his seatbelt and walked the short distance to Joe Allen, whose eyes were now shut. He might have just been resting, or he might be sound asleep, but Cargill couldn’t have cared less. “Joe,” he said loudly, pausing until Allen’s eyes slid open, which they did almost immediately.
“Yes?” mumbled Allen.
“I need you to find out if anyone asked for street camera footage around Wexler’s home the night of the extraction. If anyone did, I want to know who they are, and everything about them. Everything.”
He paused, and a fiery expression came over his face. “And Joe, it goes without saying this is extremely urgent, and extremely confidential. I don’t want you to bring anyone else on the team in on it.”
Allen nodded grimly. “Roger that,” he said.
21
Jenna spent the rest of the drive to Blake’s apartment bringing Walsh fully up to speed on all the events that had taken place since she had returned from Chicago, just the night before.
It was just so fantastic. Walsh struggled to wrap his mind around it all, and the news of Nathan’s death continued to hit him hard, as he hadn’t had any time to internalize it.
Jenna had been operating on precious little sleep for some time now, and even though it was before nine she was already in danger of flaming out. Blake made a pot of instant coffee, heavy on the caffeine, and Jenna readied herself to drink the entire pot if this was what it took to keep her awake. Given that the entire pot was meant only for her, since neither of her companions were coffee drinkers, this was a real possibility. Walsh elected to nurse a bottle of spring water, and their host chose no beverage at all.
Blake printed out three copies of Nathan’s e-mail message from Walsh’s cloud account, so they could easily refer to it, and they each took a seat around his kitchen table.
“All right, Dan,” began Jenna when they had settled in and had each reread the e-mail, extraordinary as it was. “We have to assume that Nathan was on to something, and that he’s right in every regard, agreed?”
“I think for the sake of discussion this makes sense,” replied the physicist.
“And let’s take it to the extreme,” said Jenna. “Let’s pretend he’d be able to send something back a full half-second.” She whistled. “An entire half-second. Let’s go crazy. Doesn’t really give you the chance to witness the birth of Christ or see a dinosaur, but I guess the universe makes the rules.”
“Let’s definitely use the half-second,” said Blake. “Trying to think in terms of . . .” He paused in mid-sentence to consult the text of Nathan’s e-mail. “Forty-five microseconds,” he added, “is impossible for me. It’s just too short a time to understand.” He looked at Dan Walsh. “So I guess if a millisecond is a thousandth of a second, a microsecond is what, a millionth of a second?”
“Exactly right,” said the physicist. “Nathan seems absolutely certain he can push back forty-five millionths of a second in time. And nearly certain he can repeat these increments to get to just under a half-second. So I agree with Jenna, let’s assume a half-second is feasible.”
“So why would anyone care?” said Jenna. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
Time travel stories were legion, she knew. It was one of the most popular categories of literature ever, especially during the last few generations. The number of stories, novels, TV shows, and movies in which time travel was used seemed infinite. Time travel had once been the purview of hard science fiction, but it was now not only featured in adventures and mysteries, but in comedies, and most surprising of all, the romance genre.
She had never really thought about it, but what was it that made this category so versatile, so universally popular?
The answer came to her the moment she formulated the question. First, time travel played into fantasies shared by every living human being. Who wouldn’t want to go back in time and correct a mistake, right a wrong, change how things turned out? Who wouldn’t want to have another chance to win the girl, or hit the home run? To kill Hitler, or invest in Apple or Facebook when they were just emerging?
The possibilities for redemption, for profit, and for revenge were endless and profound.
And then there were the paradoxes. Each story could be written to blow minds, as Mobius strip pretzels lovingly constructed and twisted with glee to intrigue and delight an audience. Twists upon twists upon twists, with intricate and startling reveals.
Time, like gravity, was a barrier thrown up by an unyielding universe. Mankind had always railed against both of these barriers, forever fantasizing about their eventual defeat.
But with respect to pushing back against the inexorable flow of time, it now seemed this wasn’t a fantasy any longer.
“Nathan was right, of course,” continued Jenna. “Even a half-second is far too short to make good use of. Five minutes, sure. You could do a lot with five minutes. Win the lottery. Avert a disaster. But half a second?”
“I know Nathan thinks time travel will harness this immense, um . . . quintessence energy safely,” said Blake, “but can we be sure of that? What if this really could be turned into the ultimate bomb? Could this be what’s driving all of the interest?”
He paused. “I read a novel when I was a kid called The Weapon Shops of Isher. It was science fiction, yes, but if Nathan’s discovery doesn’t verge on the science fictional, nothing does. In the novel, a man ends up traveling ages and ages back through time. But for every year back he goes, he accumulates more and more energy, until it grows to incomprehensible levels. Finally, when he arrives billions and billions of years in the past, this energy is released—explosively.”
“I read that one, too,” said Walsh enthusiastically. “Talk about paradoxes. If I’m remembering correctly, he doesn’t just explode, he’s carrying so much energy he actually causes the big bang. So this time traveler turns out to be responsible for nothing less than the birth of the universe.”
Blake smiled. “That’s the one,” he said. “Anyway, I know this is taking it to extremes, but Nathan acknowledged that he’d have to use crazy amounts of energy to pull this time travel thing off. Enough to shred the planet. He says his calculations show all of the energy will be used up safely, but what if he’s wrong? What if it works like in this science fiction story?”
Jenna drained the last of her coffee and considered this possibility further. “It’s an interesting thought,” she said. “And I’m drawing a blank on any alternatives. But my gut tells me this isn’t it. First, the guy at my house, the one I held off with some wine, he told me this was potentially dangerous, but that it was not an explosive. He could have been lying, but for some reason I believed him. And Nathan wouldn’t have written he was sure this was safe, unless, well . . . unless he was sure it was safe. And would those after this really be so zealous about something they couldn’t even be sure would happen?”
Jenna shrugged. “I’d also argue that we already have bombs that can destroy the world. So even if time travel could result in an even greater explosive force, so what?”
“I agree with Jenna,” said Walsh.
Blake nodded. “I don’t see any flaws in her reasoning myself.”
Jenna rose and poured herself another cup of coffee. It was keeping her awake for now, but she knew that she would pay later for this artificial boost to her wakefulness.
Meanwhile, Blake and Walsh were lost in thought, and from their expressions neither were reaching any epiphanies.
“Okay, so we’re dealing with a half-second,” mumbled Blake, his hand stroking his chin absently. “We can’t react in any meaningful way in this amount of time. But what about computers? For a computer, a half-second is a huge amount of time. So say you programmed a computer to see an uptick in a stock’s price, send this information back to itself a half-second earlier, and put in a buy order.”
“I’m not a stock expert, Aaron,” said Walsh, “but I’m still pretty certain this wouldn’t work. Your computer would be fast enough to take the information from a half-second in its future and put in a buy order, but you could never fill the order in time. Even if you could, second to second variations in stock prices are minuscule. And even if you could catch these minuscule upswings, the price could easily go down during the next half-second.”
Temporarily out of ideas, they decided to read Nathan’s e-mail once again. Jenna was nearly finished with yet another cup of liquid stimulant, but yawns were beginning to come periodically and she knew she was ultimately fighting a losing battle.
Jenna finished rereading the e-mail and turned to Dan Walsh. “Nathan mentions something called Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture,” she said. “Do you know what he means by this?”
“I do,” replied Walsh. “For much of history scientists believed time travel was absolutely impossible. But over the last several decades, some prominent physicists from elite universities are beginning to believe it is possible, at least theoretically.”
“Why the change of heart?” asked Jenna.
“Well, just so you know,” replied Walsh, “it’s been clear for quite a while that the laws of physics work perfectly well in either time direction: forward or backward. In the 1940s, Richard Feynman showed that anti-matter—which is a real thing, by the way—is identical, mathematically, to ordinary matter traveling backward in time. He used this insight to develop a tool, called Feynman diagrams, that revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics. So much so that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work.”
“So time travel may be possible,” said Jenna, “in theory. But has anyone ever generated any experimental evidence?”
“There’s some evidence that the future can affect the present. It’s called retrocausality. The experiments are largely in the realm of quantum physics and are too complicated to describe. But Yakir Aharonov and Jeff Tollaksen came up with what I think is a great way for the layman to think about this. Basically, it is known that if you take two radioactive atoms, absolutely identical in every conceivable way, they will decay randomly. The first might decay immediately, while the second doesn’t decay for an hour. But they are identical, and there is no way to predict when this decay will occur. And scientists have never identified any possible causes that would produce these effects. So Aharonov reasoned that if the information that controls the particles’ behavior doesn’t come from the past or present, maybe it comes from the future. Retrocausality. Cause and effect in reverse.”
“This is all mind-blowing stuff,” said Blake. “But one thing I’m confused about.” He stopped and grinned. “Okay, I’m confused about all of it, but there is one thing I’m most confused about. You said the laws of physics work equally well backwards or forwards in time. If this is the case, why does time seem to have a direction?”
“Good question,” said Walsh. “There are a number of reasons. One of them you just hit on: our perception. We only ever experience time moving in one direction. But probably the most cited reason is something called entropy, also called the second law of thermodynamics, a concept that has tremendous utility in physics. This principle basically states that things tend to go from being ordered to disordered—in one time direction only. The universe has been running down, in a single direction, since its birth. For example, people have witnessed a crystal goblet being thrown at a brick fireplace and shattering into a thousand pieces. The glass goes from ordered to disordered. But it never goes the other way. No one has ever seen a thousand pieces of glass hurled at a brick fireplace spontaneously assemble into a crystal goblet.”
Jenna and Blake tried to digest what they were being told, with limited success.
“This is all fascinating,” said Jenna to the physicist. “But you were trying to answer my first question, and I got you off on a tangent before you got there.”
“Right,” he said. “You asked about the chronology protection conjecture. As I mentioned, serious scientists have begun to take time travel seriously. But Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking aren’t buying it. Thorne says his studies suggest that all time machines would self-destruct upon activation, perhaps the universe’s way of eliminating all those fun, head-scratching time travel conundrums. Hawking believes that while the equations of quantum mechanics suggest time travel is possible, the universe will refuse to allow it, since this would be its unraveling. He half-jokingly called this the chronology protection conjecture. The conjecture basically states that the laws of physics will conspire to prevent time travel. Which has the effect, as Hawking puts it, of ‘Keeping the world safe for historians.’”
Jenna and Blake both smiled at this.
“A broader definition of this conjecture allows time travel,” continued Walsh, “but only if it doesn’t create a paradox. So let’s examine a classic paradox. Say you go back in time and kill your mother when she was a little girl. If you did that, then how were you born? But if you were never born, how did you kill your mother?”
Walsh took a drink from his plastic bottle of water and let his companions ponder this for a moment. “But if you couldn’t kill her because you were never born,” he continued, “then you would be born. So now you could kill her. It’s a circle with no beginning or end.”
Walsh arched one eyebrow. “So the broader version of the chronology protection conjecture would say you could go back in time to when your mother was a little girl. But if you were intent on killing her, one of two things would happen: One, time travel would suddenly stop working for you until you decided matricide wasn’t a good idea. Or two, it would work, but something would prevent you from succeeding. Has always prevented you. Will always prevent you.”
